D&D 5E We Would Hate A BG3 Campaign

[mamba]

I am not buying this argument. The common people are only fascinated, terrified, see it as a devil or being from their folk tales if the DM decides they do that.

and most of the time they would be exactly that in real life

Apon laying eyes on the first Dragonborn, the common tavern owner could just as easily look up yawn and ask if he wants a private room or to stay in the common room.

only if they are used to seeing weird, one of a kind creatures regularly, which I would bet they do not. The innkeeper is not secretly a men in black

 

[Vaalingrade]

GMs are generally entitled to be entitled.

Nope.

Group activity. No one is more important than anyone else at the table. Especially not because one volunteered to provide an experience to the group.

And yes volunteered. No one is actually forced to be DM.

 

[jasper]

Firefly is the perfect example of anything goes campaign.
DM Space setting where you are merchants against the evil goverment
Nat, I want to play the captain ex military

Gina, I be his side kick. No I dating Alan now. So I am married to Walsh

Alan, I just want to be a hot shot pilot

Morena, I want to be an exotic spy, no socialite.

Adam, I want to be a thug. No snipe. You know I have job could the DM have a session which gives me a reason to leave.

Jewel, I just want to be the engineer.

Summer, I want be a ninja. No Professor x. No I can’t decide.

Sean, I just want to be the healer. I try to reign Summer in.

Ron. I want to be a priest. No ex spy. No the moral compass of the group.

The Mom bans the play group after 14 sessions.

Star trek is a curate dm session

Gene, I want a space game like wagon train

Bill, I want to be captain which gets all the cute women.

Leonard, I want to be a high elf and no icky girls.

De, I want to be old healer

Jimmy can I be the enginner.

Gene, we may have let our younger brothers and sister play. I have pregens for the Navigator, weapons officer, and Radio officer.

Gene ends up going to college after 3 years of high school play.

Restricting a campaign is not evil or a bad DM. It is just restricting play to follow the DM's major plot line. And having an wide open choices is not giving into player's agency. It is just following the major plot line of the DM. What is the sandpaper is when a player is not understanding and accepting that sometimes the DM wants the restriction.

 

[ezo]

I am not buying this argument. The common people are only fascinated, terrified, see it as a devil or being from their folk tales if the DM decides they do that.

Apon laying eyes on the first Dragonborn, the common tavern owner could just as easily look up yawn and ask if he wants a private room or to stay in the common room.

and most of the time they would be exactly that in real life

only if they are used to seeing weird, one of a kind creatures regularly, which I would bet they do not. The innkeeper is not secretly a men in black

I think @ECMO3 is making the point that D&D games/world don't have to be based on our own (human) reactions, history, or assumptions about what reactions a common person would have to a dragonborn.

Compared to real-life Earth history, most D&D races would great fear and panic at first, but once known only would if that particular race had a propensity for violent or evil acts.

A DM could run a world like a Star Wars cantina if they wanted, and be perfectly right to do so. The bartender, for instance, could be used to Dragonborn, Tieflings, Hobgoblins, Yuan-Ti, or whatever.

 

[Divine2021]

Having just beaten BG3 last night, there is no way at all that WotC would publish an adventure like that—why too complex and morally gray a story. Can you imagine current day WotC, which is terrified of an always online small minority, allowing you to slaughter the entire Druid’s Grove like you can in Act 1? Heck, people on this forum threw a fit when in the new Phalandar game they forced you to turn a character into a mind flayer!

 

[ezo]

And yes volunteered. No one is actually forced to be DM.

Yeah, we've been over this before. I've had many games where no one would volunteer to DM, so I got stuck with it by default. If I didn't DM, there would be no game. Not much of a choice and I am certainly not "volunteering" as you seem to think in those cases.

 

[Maggan]

The common people are only fascinated, terrified, see it as a devil or being from their folk tales if the DM decides they do that.

Yes. As the GM I am the one who decides that and it shouldn't be controversial in the least that I as a GM has the authority to decide how the NPCs in my campaign react to things that happen in the setting I am running.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't know what to say to this.

Excellent! I love it! Also, nothing to do with what's being discussed!

Sometimes requests can be accommodated easily. Some DMs have more talent to improvise than others, which ups the odds that a request can be accommodated. You seem to be in this group. Sometimes, though, the request is colouring too far outside the lines. Maybe the DM isn't talented enough to work it in. Maybe some of the other players just can't buy into the side effects of the request. Whatever the reason, sometimes, at real tables (that aren't yours), this happens.

I have actually. Super entertaining!

I didn't use the term in the first place, but I don't think it's an odd usage at all. Integrity, in the sense of 'cohesion or internal consistency', as opposed to 'sticking to a set of moral/ethical standards', is how it seems to have been used here.

That is exactly how I meant it. Cohesion or internal consistency.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think @ECMO3 is making the point that D&D games/world don't have to be based on our own (human) reactions, history, or assumptions about what reactions a common person would have to a dragonborn.

Compared to real-life Earth history, most D&D races would great fear and panic at first, but once known only would if that particular race had a propensity for violent or evil acts.

A DM could run a world like a Star Wars cantina if they wanted, and be perfectly right to do so. The bartender, for instance, could be used to Dragonborn, Tieflings, Hobgoblins, Yuan-Ti, or whatever.

True, but they also don't have to not be based on own (human) reactions, history, and assumptions, and part of some people's sense of verisimilitude and, yes, setting integrity (I'm sticking with that term) may be that those attitudes will be reflected.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

and most of the time they would be exactly that in real life

Again, this is highly unlikely. Both in Antiquity and the Medieval Period, there was an outright expectation that there could be Incredibly Weird Things in areas sufficiently far away to be exotic. In Antiquity, that could literally be "the other side of Greece." In the Middle Ages, it was closer to "the far edge of Europe," likely due to the lingering effects of the Roman Empire linking Europe together.

And we aren't just talking like, people with weird eyes or funny skin tones. We're talking literal dog-headed people. Including--I am not joking--medieval iconographic depictions of an actual Orthodox saint with a dog's head. (Specifically, St. Christopher.) They had absolutely no trouble believing that a man with a dog's head, coming from a nation of dog-headed people, had served in the (pre-Christian) Roman Legions before receiving baptism and eventually being martyred.

The "everyone is either intensely curious or intensely fearful" thing is part of the false Dung Ages fable. Modern pop-history has swallowed, hook line and sinker, 15th century Italian propaganda about how their period of history was totally THE turning point from "darkness" (even though you can find "renaissance"-like flowerings of art and literature hundreds of years earlier in other countries) into "enlightenment."

only if they are used to seeing weird, one of a kind creatures regularly, which I would bet they do not. The innkeeper is not secretly a men in black

It really isn't nearly as unlikely as you'd think. One of the genuine, actual effects of what is called "the" Renaissance was that it really did represent a fundamental shift in the West's zeitgeist regarding the nature of reality. Prior to the Renaissance, even very learned men were quite willing to accept fully supernatural explanations for things. E.g., the medieval "scientific" experiment which claimed to demonstrate spontaneous generation (via mice "spontaneously" being generated from stored grain). This worldview existed right alongside empiricism for at least two full millennia, from the time of Socrates to the time of Newton--because he, himself, was one of the last great alchemists, despite also developing differential calculus, being the father of modern optics, and establishing the nigh-unquestionable laws of physics for almost two centuries after his death.

This fundamental shift in how we see reality--in our very understanding of what "reality" itself is--cannot be overstated. To the typical medieval person, the idea that magic was real and productive wasn't even a hypothesis, it was a self-evident fact. The dark forest wasn't simply frightening because humans don't like dark places and predators live there. It was supernaturally frightening.

I mean, for God's sake (literally!), St. Augustine laid down the official Catholic doctrine of what werewolves were. Because, unlike witches, werewolves were considered to be at least theoretically real. (Witches, on the other hand, were known to not be real. It was officially Catholic doctrine that witches did not exist, and claiming they did was actually heresy! Yet another of those lovely, pernicious modern myths about what Medieval people thought or believed.)

Point being: To a truly medieval mindset, the idea that the forest outside of town had fairies in it wasn't silly superstition. It was objective fact. Even if you never saw any fairies yourself, you believed the people who said they did. So seeing a person with horns, or a talking cat, or any number of other supernatural things? Probably a bit spooky in some cases, but hardly worthy of losing your mind over. You had too much stuff to do to worry about that.